The Underpants Gnomes of RedState

It looks like Erick Erickson bought himself a couple of tickets on Southwest Airlines and got himself to CPAC in time to give a speech to the other pasty white people about how “technology” can change the course of political fortunes by, say, inciting the masses to send rubber balls to Senators or calling retiring Supreme Court Justices “goat-fucking child molesters“. In the course of this riveting talk….

The conservative online community RedState.com and Eagle Publishing, parent company of Human Events, today entered into a new partnership. RedState.com will become the newest member of Eagle Publishing’s family of publications and websites on January 2.

“We are excited to be working in parallel with RedState and look forward to applying our efforts and resources to bolster its standing as the premier conservative grassroots community,” said Stephen O’Connor, publisher of Human Events.

RedState posted news of the announcement earlier today. The site’s managing editor, Erick-Woods Erickson, said the new arrangement would provide RedState with the resources it needs to continue playing a leading role in the conservative movement.

“Becoming part of Eagle Publishing, a long-standing, respected leader of conservative publishing, is an exciting opportunity for us,” Erickson said in a press release. “With the resources of a committed and innovative company behind it, we will take the site to an even higher, more effective level.”

Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”

[…]

In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book.

Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books,” Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

We pause here for…

But, getting back to RedState, exactly how much money do they bring in to Eagle Publishing? A recent look at RedState shows two (2) ads currently running, one for $1000 a week and one for $500 a week which, although not spare change, hardly pays for bandwidth to say nothing of Erick Erickson’s salary (Erick is supposedly the only person drawing a salary. Guys like Moe Lane presumably do it for the chicks, I suppose).